Mission Specialist Stanley Love looks at the experiment racks inside the Columbus Research Laboratory in the Space Station Processing Facility.

STS-122 Mission Specialist Stanley Love looks at the experiment racks inside the Columbus Research Laboratory in the Space Station Processing Facility. He and other crew members are at Kennedy to take part in a crew equipment interface test, which helps familiarize them with equipment and payloads for the mission. Among the activities standard to a CEIT are harness training, inspection of the thermal protection system and camera operation for planned extravehicular activities, or EVAs. The crew comprises Commander Stephen Frick, Pilot Alan Poindexter, and Mission Specialists Rex Walheim, Stanley Love, Leland Melvin and Hans Schlegel, who represents the European Space Agency. The Columbus Lab is Europe’s largest contribution to the construction of the International Space Station. It will support scientific and technological research in a microgravity environment. Columbus, a program of ESA, is a multifunctional, pressurized laboratory that will be permanently attached to Node 2 of the space station to carry out experiments in materials science, fluid physics and biosciences, as well as to perform a number of technological applications. STS-122 is targeted for launch in December. Photo credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann